18 December 2013

Assassination dept.

In the summer of 2003, while Congress debated a crucial vote on the future of the plan, Wyden instructed an intern to sift through the Pentagon's documents about T.I.A. The intern discovered that one of the program's ideas was to create a futures market in which anonymous users could place bets on events such as assassinations and terrorist attacks, and get paid on the basis of whether the events occurred.

Compare with the Assassination Market that Bitcoin's detractors grouse about: a site that offers crowd-sourced Bitcoin bounties to assassins of government officials (reported in this November Forbes article). Interesting that an anarchist started the web site and that TIA's and NSA's overreach so keenly embodies the anarchist concept of "might makes right".